76. Stuart Armstrong - AI: Humanity's Endgame?

Paradoxically, it may be easier to predict the far future of humanity than to predict our near future.

The next fad, the next Netflix special, the next President — all are nearly impossible to anticipate. That’s because they depend on so many trivial factors: the next fad could be triggered by a viral video someone filmed on a whim, and well, the same could be true of the next Netflix special or President for that matter.

But when it comes to predicting the far future of humanity, we might oddly be on more solid ground. That’s not to say predictions can be made with confidence, but at least they can be made based on economic analysis and first principles reasoning. And most of that analysis and reasoning points to one of two scenarios: we either attain heights we’ve never imagined as a species, or everything we care about gets wiped out in a cosmic scale catastrophe.

Few people have spent more time thinking about the possible endgame of human civilization as my guest for this episode of the podcast, Stuart Armstrong. Stuart is a Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, where he studies the various existential risks that face our species, focusing most of his work specifically on risks from AI. Stuart is a fascinating and well-rounded thinker with a fresh perspective to share on just about everything you could imagine, and I highly recommend giving the episode a listen.